1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer program product, system, and method for hypervisor agnostic interchangeable backup recovery and file level recovery from virtual disks.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a virtual machine environment, a hypervisor creates and runs multiple virtual machines. Virtual machines may access data in one or more virtual disks, which provide a virtual representation of physical storage devices. A backup program may backup the virtual disk. IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager “(TSM” for Virtual Environments (referred to as Data Protection for VMware®) offloads the backup workloads from the system hosting the virtual machines to a virtual storage (vStorage) backup server. A Tivoli Storage Manager backup-archive client (installed on the vStorage backup server) may perform complete full, incremental, and incremental forever snapshots of the virtual machines. The Tivoli Storage Manager may normalize the storage of the data by storing in a format independent of the original source data for the virtual disk, known as a common data format.
By normalizing the way that the data is stored and managed, i.e., storing it in a format that is independent of the original source data, many levels of service can be offered, such as restoring individual files from an image of a virtual machine, recovering data that originally resided in a traditional physical environment into a virtual machine or vice versa, etc. The TSM utilizes a “common data format” which normalizes data from physical volumes and from VMware virtual machines to realize some of these use cases, especially restoring individual files from an image of a VMware virtual machine. (TIVOLI and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation throughout the world; VMWARE is a registered trademark of VMWARE Inc. throughout the world)
The TSM system may also reduce the amount of data needed to represent a backup version by utilizing change block tracking (CBT) technology that provides only data that has changed between backups to create backup versions. TSM uses the change block tracking mechanism to produce an “incremental forever” backup which only requires that a full backup is taken initially (i.e., all blocks currently used by the virtual machine) and afterwards can rely on incremental backups to represent backup versions. TSM manages the blocks that are incrementally captured to produce multiple recovery points of the entire virtual machine to the end-user. In summary, backups are optimized through incremental forever backup and by storing data in a common data format, the backups can be used either for recovery of an entire virtual machine or for individual files.